A newsletter about disability and deviance by Jesse Meadows.
“Sluggish is about embracing the slow, the weird, and the squished underfoot.
I write about the politics of mental illness, the narratives that shape our dis-order, and the culture that makes our brains. I also love to go off on tangents about nature, history, and sense-making through art. (It’s all connected, though, I promise.)”
Lyric Rivera aka Neurodivergent Rebel wrote this post about the history of the controversial puzzle piece analogy, and why it cannot be reclaimed. “One can easily see that the non-autistics who created this logo thought Autism was a “bad thing” and Autistic kids were “sad” or unhappy because of their Autism (when we’re often unhappy because of how non-autistics TREAT us due to our Autistic brains and presentation). Over time, this logo has come to represent to many a view that is probably even more problematic (especially in ABA circles) that Autistic People are “missing a piece” of themselves and that IF our Autism could be “taken away” from us, we could be “whole” and no-longer Autistic.”
“This letter discusses the origins of the concept and theory of neurodiversity. It is important to correctly attribute concept and theories to the people who developed them. For some time, the concept of neurodiversity has primarily been attributed to one person, Judy Singer. We consider the available evidence and show that the concept and theory in fact has multiple origins. We draw particular attention to recent archival findings that show the concept of ‘neurological diversity’ was being used years earlier than previously thought. ‘Neurodiversity’ means the same thing as ‘neurological diversity’ and does not change the theory in any way. We conclude that both the concept of neurological diversity or neurodiversity, and the body of theory surrounding it, should be understood as having been collectively developed by neurodivergent people.”
By Monique Botha, Robert Chapman, Morénike Giwa Onaiwu, Steven K Kapp, Abs Stannard Ashley, Nick Walker.
A 2024 study into the benefits of Body Doubling by Tessa Eagle, Leya Breanna Baltaxe-Admony and Kathryn E. Ringland.
“Body doubling has emerged as a community-driven phenomenon primarily employed by neurodivergent individuals. In this work, we survey 220 people to investigate how, when, and why they engage in body doubling and their own definitions for it.”
A 2023 article by Devon Price unpacking body doubling, “executive dysfunction,” and the pathology model of ADHD.
“Many of the challenges of having ADHD could easily be addressed with interventions that are social rather than medical — but such an approach is nearly impossible for our current mental healthcare system to make sense of, or profit from. And so, for now, ADHDers and those of us who love them are stuck inventing our own solutions, and providing one another with the best support that we can.”
“Our needs and strengths interlocked perfectly, as is so often the case in ADHer-Autistic friendships. When psychology and psychiatry had little to offer us but stigma and self-blame, we took care of one another. We each needed other people. And that was the exact opposite of being disordered.”
Written by Sins Invalid, these principles guide us towards collective access and liberation, through intersectional, anti-capitalist, cross-disability, sustainable interdependence.
“Sins Invalid recognizes that we will be liberated as whole beings—as disabled, as queer, as Black, as Brown, as trans/nonbinary, as exactly who and how we are. We know we are far greater whole than divided. We recognize that our allies emerge from many communities and that demographic identity alone does not determine one’s commitment to liberation.”
This doctoral research project by our member Aby Watson, critically interrogates solo choreography and performance through a lens of the neurodiversity paradigm, and a lived experience of neurodivergence, specifically dyspraxia; a neurotype which affects memory, coordination, cognitive processing, and the execution of movements. Yet, through the process of a paradigm shift, this study widens its focus to consider neurodivergence more broadly. Deliberations of choreography itself also become expanded, to explore increasingly interdisciplinary modes of dance alongside alternate social relations and modes of spectatorship within the performance space.